Seeing Voices: A Journey Into the World of the Deaf

In Seeing Voices, Oliver Sacks turns his attention to the subject of deafness, and the result is a deeply felt portrait of a minority struggling for recognition and respect - a minority with its own rich, sometimes astonishing, culture and unique visual language, an extraordinary mode of communication that tells us much about the basis of language in hearing people as well.

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Publisher's Summary

Like The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, this is a fascinating voyage into a strange and wonderful land, a provocative meditation on communication, biology, adaptation, and culture. In Seeing Voices, Oliver Sacks turns his attention to the subject of deafness, and the result is a deeply felt portrait of a minority struggling for recognition and respect - a minority with its own rich, sometimes astonishing, culture and unique visual language, an extraordinary mode of communication that tells us much about the basis of language in hearing people as well. Seeing Voices is, as Studs Terkel has written, "an exquisite, as well as revelatory, work".

PLEASE NOTE: Some changes have been made to the original manuscript with the permission of Oliver Sacks.

What I expected when I purchased this book was what one usually gets in an Oliver Sacks book: a neurological examination of a form of perception. In fact, I thought it was a book about synesthesia (especially given the title). It is, rather, a rich and detailed history of the treatment (and, far too often mistreatment) of deafness in the Western world. I highly recommend this book not only for fans of Oliver Sacks who will enjoy this change of pace from this usual fare (which is, I must insist, itself quite good on the whole) but also for those who wish to understand the richness and challenges of the deaf community and the challenges that have faced them in Western culture for the past four hundred years.

From the author who has written many other books on the brain, this book is about how pre-lingual deafness differs from those who learned a spoken language before they lost their ability to hear. The connections of language to thought, the mis-assumptions of hearing people and the impact of using sign language has on the brain are wrapped together in a free-flowing, almost stream of consciousness. There were some bits that were technical enough so that I would like to re-read them. Most, however, was very understandable by the amateur.

I found this book to be really a matter of discovery. Discovery of a world of the deaf which lays hidden for most people. Sacks does a great job describing their culture, their language, their friction with a hearing society and the sometimes superhuman skills they acquire without sound.A great experience on what is like to be human and experience the world in a way most of us never will. Davis' performance is excellent, and the foreword and afterword by Sacks himself is greatly welcomed.I highly recommend it to anyone as a juicy first-taste into a much bigger topic.

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